Investigating Police: A Flood of New Cases

By RONALD SULLIVAN

Published: April 4, 1991

The Manhattan District Attorney has quietly created a special unit to handle police misconduct cases, including accusations of brutality and corruption, which the unit's chief said are rising sharply.

The chief, Larry Stephens, said the seven-month-old unit, intended to create more distance between investigators and the police, was being swamped by an outpouring of accusations. Charges of brutality in particular have surged tremendously in the weeks since Los Angeles police officers were videotaped beating a motorist, he said.

"As much as I feel for the victim," Mr. Stephens said of the Los Angeles case, "that tape has done more for generating public outrage and prosecutorial awareness of police brutality than anything that has ever happened before it.

"Before that tape, many people could simply not believe something like that could happen," he said. "Now they saw it with their own eyes and now they believe it."

Michael Cherkasky, the assistant district attorney in charge of the office's investigation division, said the new unit, called the Official Corruption Unit, was created to assure the independence and confidentiality of investigations of police misconduct.

"Over the years many district attorneys simply came to rely on the police too much," he said. "Their objectivity began to wear off."

The unit, which has been operating since September, uses only investigators who are not police officers, and will soon be moved out of the Criminal Courts building into an undisclosed Manhattan office building. The move is meant to insure that police witnesses would not be seen by other officers and to keep it distant from anyone who might compromise a case. Murder, Larceny, Brutality

Right now, Mr. Stephens said, the unit is investigating accusations of murder, larceny, brutality, shaking down drug pushers and planting incriminating evidence on pushers. He declined to give details.

Mr. Stephens said that accusations of police corruption seemed to be growing faster than at any time since the Knapp Commission of the 1970's. The volume and consistency of recent complaints have convinced him, he said, that corruption among police officers is again growing. "If things keep going the way they are going, we may need another Knapp Commission," he said.

But he said he doubted that his office -- which has four prosecutors and eight investigators -- is big enough to be fully up to the task. He said he had been able to open formal investigations only on 280 of the 600 complaints his office has handled in the last seven months. Quiet Creation

Two of his investigators are retired detectives, and others are former investigators for district attorneys -- officers with badges who function like detectives, but who are not in the Police Department.

Mr. Stephens's unit was created in September without any publicity. The first time its existence was publicly acknowledged was on March 21, when Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, announced the indictment of three New York City police officers on charges that, while off duty after a party, they beat and pistol-whipped three men they pulled from a taxi because they wanted the cab.

Mr. Stephens was at the news conference and Mr. Morgenthau credited his unit with the indictments -- its first major case. But his presence and the significance of the new unit went unnoticed and unreported. Back to Arm's Length

In recent years, investigations of police misconduct in New York City have largely been handled by a special state prosecutor, whose office was created after the Knapp Commission uncovered widespread corruption in the early 1970s. But the office of the special prosecutor was abolished by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo last year, leaving it up to district attorneys to organize their own investigations.

Such offices were established in 1984 in Brooklyn by Elizabeth Holtzman, who was then the district attorney, and in 1987 in Queens, by District Attorney John Santucci.

Complaints that do not involve felonies are handled by the Police Department's Civilian Review Complaint Board, which can recommend departmental charges. Its investigations are conducted by police detectives.

In Manhattan, charges of police corruption and brutality normally were handled by assistant district attorneys in the huge trial division or by prosecutors in the rackets bureau. But Mr. Cherkasky said the normally close cooperation between the police and assistant district attorneys had often removed the "arm's length tension" that he said should exist between them.

Mr. Stephens said many problems arose when prosecutors were asked to investigate both a brutality complaint filed by a defendant and the case in which the defendant was charged.

Mr. Stephens, a 34-year-old Columbia Law School graduate, is a former assistant Manhattan district attorney who most recently served as inspector general in the New York City Department of Investigation.

In an interview in his office adjoining grand jury rooms on the ninth floor, he said, "The only way to stop corruption or brutality is with arrests, indictments and convictions."

But investigators, he said, still run up against the "blue wall of silence" -- the reluctance of police to admit anything that would make trouble for another officer.

Photo: Larry Stephens, chief of the Official Corruption Unit, which investigates and prosecutes police misconduct cases. (Neal Boenzi/The New York Times)